National Institute of Economic and Social Research

Friday, 22 September 2017

Did Theresa May just commit the UK to
keeping a key Vote Leave promise? No, not the £350 million – we may be getting
back full control over our own laws, but not the laws of arithmetic. I mean this
one, signed
by three current members of the Cabinet, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, and
Michael Gove:

There will be no change for EU citizens
already lawfully resident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be
granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less
favourably than they are at present

In fact, when the UK belatedly
produced its counterproposals
on the rights of UK citizens in the EU and EU citizens here, they were considerably
less generous than the offer made by the EU27, and in particular they explicitly
removed a number of important rights. Perhaps most obviously, the UK proposes that
EU citizens in the UK will no longer have the same rights to be joined by
family members, but instead will be subject to the considerably more
restrictive rules applied to UK nationals:

Future family members of those EU
citizens who arrived before the specified date – for example a future spouse –
who come to the UK after we leave the EU, will be subject to the same rules
that apply to non-EU nationals joining British citizens

Now, some might argue that this is “fair”,
because it brings to an end a position where EU nationals in the UK (and indeed
UK nationals elsewhere in the EU) have, in some respects, more rights than
Britons here. On the other hand, EU nationals who moved here exercising their
free movement rights did so on the basis that they had these rights, which the UK
signed up to in various Directives.

Moreover – and this is my view – if anyone is
really worried about the “unfairness” to British citizens, then that unfairness
could be ended tomorrow by the UK government, which could simply give us the same
rights EU citizens have. The fact that most of those who make this argument are
unprepared to contemplate this solution carries more than a whiff of hypocrisy. Nor are these the only rights EU nationals
will lose, as Dr Mike Ward explains.

Some commentators – in particular,
Migration Watch and Daniel Hannan – continue to attempt to mislead
the public about this: for example, Daniel Hannan recently claimed
that “EU citizens will have all the same rights as now”, while Migration Watch argue
that when they said that “EU citizens will keep their existing rights” they
didn’t mean all their
existing rights. But no one senior in government
has made such an obviously false claim; indeed, David Davis explicitly
recognised that EU nationals would lose some of their current rights, saying “we
agonised” over the issue.

That is, until today, when in response
to a question from an Italian journalist, the Prime Minister did just that (video – at about 1.13):

Q. As you said, 600,000 Italians now live in the
UK. You said that you want them to
remain. What is going to change for them
– I guess something is going to change?

A.
(the Prime Minister). We set out that for those EU citizens
currently living in the UK who have made the UK their home, including those
600, 000 Italians who are in the UK, we want them to be able to stay and to have
the same rights as they have at the moment.

That is unequivocal. The same rights they have now. Now, of course, the Prime Minister’s statement
is technically untrue – the UK has set out no such thing.

But that’s not really the point,
because what matters is not what we’ve said so far, but what we do next – and in
particular, what David Davis and Ollie Robbins, our lead representatives, say
at the negotiations next week. Monsieur
Barnier has already signalled very
clearly in his response to the speech that he expects them to make good on the Prime
Minister’s promise.

So do they say that the Prime Minister
didn’t really mean it, or didn’t understand what she was saying, and that the
UK’s position remains unchanged – we have no intention of giving EU citizens “the
same rights as they have at the moment”?
In that case, why on earth should anyone in the rest of the EU27 take
anything she, or the UK government says, seriously? Such a course would be
deeply damaging to the Prime Minister’s credibility (especially in Italy, where
her comments have been widely, and accurately, reported). Or do they, belatedly, do the right thing,
and change the UK’s approach - a course
of action which would generate a huge amount of goodwill? Three million EU citizens here and a million
Britons elsewhere in the EU are waiting to hear.

Wednesday, 5 April 2017

Fraser Nelson is upset with this passage, from my blog about statistics yesterday:

A similar, but
even more toxic, disjunction from reality is seen in those who claim that
poverty is not about money. For example, Fraser Nelson frequentlyclaimsthat the Labour government saw poverty
solely through the lens of numbers, and that the Brown strategy of attacking
child poverty by redistributing money to the poor via tax credits was simply
manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet.

You quote me
saying “poverty is not about money”. I’ve never said that. My point: it’s not
JUST about money. Please correct.

Fraser can read
and isn’t stupid, so he knows perfectly well I didn’t “quote” him directly
saying “poverty is not about money”; rather, I attributed that view to him (among others). And I linked to his Telegraph
article, in which he says this:

At the heart of
the Child Poverty Act lies an agenda which has arguably done more damage to
Britain’s social fabric than any idea in modern history. It is based on the
Eurostat definition of poverty: an income 40 per cent below the national
average....instead of fighting poverty, the Labour government
spent billions manipulating a spreadsheet – to catastrophic effect.

Tax credits
boosted the incomes of low income families and reduced poverty as measured by
low income. It is therefore, as a matter
of simple logic, impossible for Fraser to admit that, as he did yesterday,
that “low income is the most
important measure of poverty”,
and at the same time stand by his earlier view that billions were spent on tax
credits “instead of fighting poverty”.

If Fraser’s
point was that at least some of the money spent on tax credits could have been
spent more efficiently on addressing poverty in other ways – that is, that what
Labour did was not necessarily the best way of fighting poverty - then he could
have said that. But he didn’t. Instead, he claimed that money spent on tax
credits made absolutely no difference to poverty – and indeed, in some
undefined sense, had a “catastrophic” impact.
And just in case anyone thinks I’m quoting him selectively, nowhere in
his entire article is there anything remotely consistent with his admission
yesterday that low income is indeed the most important measure of poverty..

Now it may be that the obvious contradiction between Fraser’s
article and what he said yesterday means he’s changed his mind. In that case he
should say so. Or maybe he never really meant what he wrote, but went over the
top in his hyperbole, Again, he should say so. What he shouldn’t do is try to
pretend he never made an argument he – rightly – describes
as “repugnant”.

Monday, 3 April 2017

One of the occupational hazards of taking data and statistics seriously – and using social media to do so – is frequent accusations that my focus on hard numbers means that I have my head in the clouds, or buried in a computer, and am therefore somehow detached from “reality”. I’ve lost count of the number of times a Twitter link to a chart, research paper or ONS data release, making a point about what the evidence shows, is greeted by some version of “why don’t you stop looking at spreadsheets and get out into the real world?”

This is particularly the case for immigration. The response to the overwhelming evidence that, in the UK, there is no measurable impact of immigration on employment, and only a very modest impact on the wages of the low-paid, is often an anecdote, a reference to (perceived) personal experience, or just an injunction that I should spend more time in the pub. Here’s a recent typicalexample (amazingly and embarrassingly, from a lecturer at King’s, my own university, in a scientific discipline):

Jonathan Portes gave an accomplished performance, asserting that immigration has boosted society, and that it hasn’t depressed wages. Such thinking may be lapped up by a forum of intelligentsia, but try telling that to my landscape gardener friend, who has been severely undercut by waves of east Europeans.

I was reminded of this by a tweet, attached to a passage in David Goodhart’s new book. This, Daniel Bentley at Civitas argued, is a “really underappreciated point”

In recent years the falling relative pay for basic jobs, the overwhelming stress on mobility and educational stress, the hourglass labour market and the apartheid system created by a mass higher education system have all made it harder for the mainly Somewhere people doing routine jobs to feel valued and dignified in the modern economy.

Underappreciated, perhaps, because it’s wrong. Leaving aside the truly bizarre apartheid analogy (Mr Goodhart has a habit of this sort of thing, as I've noted before) the claim that “in recent years” relative pay has fallen for basic jobs is simply false. It’s true enough that earnings inequality did widen sharply in the 1980s and early 90s. But this isn’t exactly “recently”, and has absolutely nothing to do with the post-1997 immigration Mr Goodhart blames for much of the UK’s contemporary problems. Indeed, over the last decade, if anything, boosted by increases in the National Minimum Wage, it has improved somewhat, as this chart shows:

Now I would argue that this point – that workers at the lower end of the earnings distribution have done particularly badly - is pretty fundamental to the entire argument Mr Goodhart is making (indeed, the importance of this paragraph to Mr Goodhart’s thesis is presumably why Mr Bentley highlighted it). So you might think that getting it wrong matters rather a lot. But I have no doubt what Mr Goodhart’s response will be. As with my review of his earlier book, “The British Dream”, which listed (very much non-exhaustively) a number of his more glaring factual errors, he wouldsay that I am “sniping in the footnotes” and that I spend too much time with databases and not enough in the “real world”.

But there is a fundamental problem with the argument by those like Dr McCrae or Mr Goodhart that “spreadsheets” or “databases” are somehow divorced from reality, while the experiences of (selected) individuals represents it. In fact, spreadsheets – or at least the ones used by labour market economists and, indeed, quantitative social scientists more broadly, are far more closely connected to the “real world” than any individuals’ experience can hope to be.

Consider the Labour Force Survey (LFS), the primary data source for economists analysing the UK labour market. Each quarter the LFS samples 40,000 households, covering 100,000 individuals, a representative sample of (broadly) the UK resident population; lengthy interviews are conducted in person (and subsequently by phone) and cover a wide range of topics in considerable detail, from education, earnings and employment to age, marital and family status, country of birth, and disability.

So when I say that the evidence is clear that immigration doesn’t impact on the employment of UK-born residents, this analysis is formulated in terms of numbers on a spreadsheet or data points in a regression. But behind those numbers are what tens of thousands of real people have told professional interviewers, and in a way which means that the results are in turn representative of lived experience of the UK population as a whole. So the statement that, say, the bottom decile of full-time workers have recently seen their pay rise faster than average is not (just) a statement about numbers, or a claim that Mr Goodhart has failed to read the right ONS spreadsheet. It is a statement about what has – contrary to Mr Goodhart’s claim - actually happened to the pay packets of several million people. It is the spreadsheet, not what my nephew looking for a job, your cab driver, or Dr McCrae’s landscape gardener friend say that best reflect the real world.

A similar, but even more toxic, disjunction from reality is seen in those who claim that poverty is not about money. For example, Fraser Nelson frequently claims that the Labour government saw poverty solely through the lense of numbers, and that the Brown strategy of attacking child poverty by redistributing money to the poor via tax credits was simply manipulating numbers on aspreadsheet:

Someone who is nudged just above this threshold, with an extra £10 a week, is deemed to be “lifted out of poverty”, although the people concerned would be astounded to hear themselves so described. If they had a family, then their children would be described as being “lifted out of poverty”. So, by precision-bombing the right people with tax credits, you could claim to have lifted hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.,, instead of fighting poverty, the Labour government spent billions manipulating a spreadsheet – to catastrophic effect.

[UPDATE: Fraser Nelson doesn't like this description of his views. I discuss his contradictions here]And indeed it is true that this approach was shaped and driven by numbers on spreadsheets – numbers which represented hundreds of thousands of low-income families with more money in their bank accounts to spend on food, shoes or the occasional holiday. There’s plenty of evidence that’s exactly what happened, with commensurate improvements in child welfare. A comprehensive review by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded – unsurprisingly to anyone who knows anything at all about the topic:

Children in low-income households do less well than their better-off peers on many outcomes in life, such as education or health, simply because they are poorer

In other words, despite Mr Nelson’s rather convenient assumption, the spreadsheet-driven policy – by ensuring that low-income parents had enough money to look after their children - worked in the real world.

None of this means that talking to people – or, more relevantly for these topics, rigorous qualitative research, which is generally not what the critics mean – is not useful and sometimes necessary to get a full picture. But suggesting that data doesn’t represent reality as well as personal experience is simply the opposite of the truth. If you want to know what’s actually going on in the real world, look at the data.

Saturday, 4 March 2017

The report of the Commons Committee on Exiting
the EU (known to its friends as the Brexit Committee) on the rights of EU
citizens resident here, and UK citizens resident in other EU countries, is a
welcome contribution to a debate that has so far generated rather more heat
than light.

The
headlines will be for its recommendation that “the UK should now make a unilateral
recommendation to safeguard the rights of EU nationals living in the UK” (in
other words, that the government should accept at least the spirit of the Lords’
amendment passed last week).

This is
entirely sensible; the government’s line that we need to hold back on this commitment
to use as a “bargaining chip” (regardless of what you think of the morality of
this approach) is flimsy at best. For
it to be a useful bargaining chip, we would need a credible threat; since there
is neither the political will or the administrative capacity to deport large numbers
of EU citizens, this does not exist.

In the
meantime, the government’s refusal to commit is damaging the UK, both directly and in terms
of the UK’s image. In fact, this line is
dictated far more by domestic politics – in particular, the need to show that
it is the government, not Parliament, that will shape our approach to Brexit –
than by the Article 50 negotiation strategy.

But the report
is perhaps most useful for its thorough and detailed explanation of the administrative
and bureaucratic hurdles that will remain even when a solution is agreed in principle.
As I wrote back in August:

The practical
issues involved are formidable..There aren’t any ideal options – just less bad
ones. But anybody who thinks that with the best will in the world this will be
an easy issue to resolve is living in a fantasy world.”

The
Committee echoes this, and calls on the government, as a matter of urgency, to
either reform or (preferably) replace entirely the current permanent residency
application process:

The current process for consideration of permanent residency
applications is not fit for purpose and, in the absence of any concrete
resolution to relieve the anxiety felt by the estimated three million EU
citizens resident in the UK, it is untenable to continue with the system as it
stands. We recommend that the Government set out whether it intends the
permanent residence system to be the basis for EU nationals to demonstrate
their eligibility to reside in the UK once the UK leaves the EU. If so then it
needs to set out as a matter of urgency, how it will reform the permanent
residence application system. If not, then it needs to set out what an
alternative system will involve and what will be expected of EU nationals to
demonstrate their eligibility to reside in the UK once the UK leaves the EU.

Importantly,
there is absolutely no reason for the government not to start on this now and
to say so; in practical terms, it wouldn’t commit the government to doing
anything it won’t have to do at some point anyway. The fact that it hasn’t
reflects a combination of bureaucratic inertia and political unwillingness to
accept the inevitable consequences (for Home Office resources, for employers, and
for individuals). But reality has to kick in sometime. The sooner this happens, the smoother the process
will be, and the less unnecessary damage that will be inflicted. The Committee has a large number of detailed
and practical recommendations (on the need for any process to be simple,
without unrealistic administrative or
technical hurdles, and for
data-sharing). The government would do
well to listen.

Separately,
the Committee also discusses the post-Brexit immigration system, without coming
to any particularly firm conclusions. But it does make two important, related
points. First, that “taking back control” when it comes to immigration
policy/free movement doesn’t have much to do with border control per se. The Committee quotes me:

Ending free movement
immigration control is not going to be enforced at the borders at all. It
simply is not. We are still going to let people in, at Stansted and Heathrow,
with French passports. They just will not have the right to work here, and that
right to work will be enforced at the workplace.”

This
point is fundamental – it is employers (and landlords, public services,
universities, etc) who will be at the sharp end of changes to free movement. As the Committee says, “any new system will
add to the regulatory burden.” Or, as I put it:

When
it comes to immigration, “taking back control” means expanding the size and
role of the state.”

However,
one potential advantage of this point – that what we do at border controls is
not necessarily determined by what we do about individuals’ right to work in
the UK – is reflected in the Committee’s acceptance that there could, in
principle, be a geographic component to future policy – a Scottish work permit,
or a London one. Those who say that this
would require border controls at Hadrian’s Wall or the M25 simply miss the
point.

There’s
lots more detail on this and other issues in the report, which is certainly the
best summary of this set of issues produced so far;
it is well worth reading in full.

Thursday, 23 February 2017

Today’s immigration figures are the first with any
meaningful data after the Brexit vote. And they show – as I predicted back in August – a fall in EU migration to the UK,
particularly those coming from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (the
“EU8”) that joined the EU in 2004; in the year to September, net migration from
these countries fell by about 20,000. Meanwhile,
the number of new National Insurance registrations in the year to December was
flat, but again numbers from the EU8 fell.
Broadly, the figures are consistent with the fall in the number of EU
nationals in the UK workforce that I highlighted last week. Non-EU immigration also fell, particularly
for students, now at the lowest level since 2002.

So what’s going on? After all, nothing has changed in law or
policy terms– we are still a member of the EU, and will be for some time, and
we still have freedom of movement. But
it’s not just today’s law that matters to existing and future migrants. I also warned back in August that even if politicians behaved
sensibly, dealing with the status of EU nationals already here was likely to be
an intractable bureaucratic tangle. Since then, the government has done little
or nothing to reassure them, nor to streamline the process. It is hardly surprising
that some are already choosing to leave.

More broadly, if people
cannot plan with any confidence, not just about themselves but their families,
they are both less likely to come and less likely to stay. Small wonder that
employers – not just farmers, but sectors
ranging from the National
Health Service to universities – are finding it far harder to persuade EU
nationals to take up jobs in this country.
And this, once again, illustrates a vitally important point; migration
is not just a matter of the UK choosing migrants; migrants have to choose us. Even
if we wish to remain open to skilled migrants from elsewhere in the EU
post-Brexit, they may not choose to come here (or remain here).

It is still very early days –
forecasting migration flows, particularly at a time of policy change, is extremely
difficult. But we can already begin to
sketch out the long-term implications. If, as my previous research predicts, net migration from the EU falls
by more than half over the next five years, the economic
impact on the UK will be significant; the resulting hit to GDP could be
about 0.6 to 1.2%, with a GDP per capita reduction of 0.2 to 0.8%. Over the
period to 2030, the resulting reduction in GDP per capita could be up to 3.4%.
By contrast, the increase in low-skilled wages resulting from reduced migration
is expected to be relatively modest.

So those who – from both
sides – have argued
that Brexit will not lead to a substantial fall in migration, especially from
the EU, are wrong.Indeed, the
government’s target of reducing migration to the “tens of thousands” is not
nearly as unrealistic
as many think – particularly if the labour market weakens significantly over
the next year or two. But the government
– and those who support an end to free movement – should be careful what they
wish for. Perhaps it will ease very slightly
pressure on the wages of some low-paid workers; but this will be far outweighed
to the cost to us all in growth and tax revenues.

Thursday, 2 February 2017

Launching the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry on immigration, Yvette Cooper called for a "national debate" claiming that immigration "was was one of those things that people just thought was a bit too difficult to talk about". As Stephen Bush points out, virtually the only plausible explanation for this nonsensical assertion is that Yvette is somehow stuck in a Star Trek style time loop. I first started working on immigration issues in the Cabinet Office in late 1999; migration, in one form or another, hasn't been out of the news since. The paper I wrote then was published in early 2001, accompanied by considerable publicity, precisely because Tony Blair (and some of his Ministers, like Barbara Roche) wanted a constructive debate on immigration. Sadly, they largely failed, as Yvette's intervention today and countless others like it from politicians who should know better show. However, one major achievement of that report was to kick-start funding and other government support for academic research on immigration, and in particular the economics of immigration, that had up to then been largely absent. We now know quite a lot about the impacts of immigration on the UK economy and labour market; as my contribution to the ongoing debate, I've tried to synthesise the evidence in my written testimony to the inquiry (this also formed the basis for much of my oral evidence to the Exiting the EU Committee earlier this week). In my view, the key points are:

immigration doesn't appear to have any negative impacts on the employment prospects of native workers (indeed, the employment rate is at historic highs). While the evidence on wage impacts is less conclusive, the emerging consensus is that recent migration has had little or no impact overall, but possibly some, small, negative impact on low-skilled workers. But other factors, positive and negative (technological change, policies on tax credits, the National Minimum Wage) were far more important.

recent migrants, especially those from the EU, are likely to have a positive fiscal impact; however, positive net impact on public finances at the national level does not preclude significant impact on demand (and hence cost) at the local level. Broader concerns about the potential negative impacts on public services appear to be largely unsubstantiated. This does not mean, of course, that citizens do not associate their experience of deterioration in public service quality and availability resulting from other factors with immigration ; the fact that migrants' fiscal contribution could, in principle, at least provide enough funding to cover their marginal impact on demand is not much comfort in practice if those revenues are in fact being allocated elsewhere, for tax cuts or deficit reduction, as in fact has been the case

the impact of immigration on productivity and hence (per capita) growth is methodologically harder to estimate. But there is growing empirical evidence, based on cross country data, of positive impacts from migration on productivity and per capita GDP.

I also discuss some of the common misperceptions about changes to the UK immigration system post-Brexit. Briefly, ending free movement

might reduce migration to the tens of thousands, especially if accompanied by a much weaker labour market;

doesn't in itself mean a "hard border" between Northern and Southern Ireland;

will reduce high skilled as well as low skilled immigration;

will involve considerably greater burdens on business, as "immigration control" is about workplaces much more than borders;

and is likely to reduce GDP, GDP per capita/living standards, and worsen the UK's fiscal position.

A useful "public debate" might begin with this evidence base and move on from there. We can but hope. My full written testimony, with references, is here.

Monday, 16 January 2017

Interviewed for ITN/Channel 4 News, I was asked – very
reasonably – why anyone should listen to economists’ views on the economic
impacts of Brexit, when many short-term forecasts that a Brexit vote would lead
to a sharp slowing of the economy had been proved wrong. This was my response:

“Short-term economic forecasting
is very unreliable. Just because the weatherman gets it wrong about whether
it’s going to snow tomorrow doesn’t mean that the scientists have it wrong
about whether climate change is going to make the planet warmer over the medium
to long term”

But they were (mostly)
wrong. On the markets, while the pound
did indeed fall much as expected (which is actually good for economic activity
in the short-term; the exchange rate acts a shock absorber to the expected long
term hit to the economy by making UK exports cheaper) market interest rates
didn’t rise and the stock market didn’t collapse (although UK companies have
certainly underperformed). More importantly, after an initial shock to
confidence, businesses and consumers appear to have decided that nothing has
happened yet and nothing much will happen for a while; so it’s business as
usual. Research on uncertainty, it turns out, isn’t exactly a certainty.

We can dismiss a
couple of excuses for this failure. It’s true Brexit hasn’t happened yet – but
the forecasts were explicitly related not to Brexit, but to the uncertainty and
expected future impact of Brexit. It’s true some (but not all) of the forecasts assumed immediate Article 50 notification,
but that was not central – and if it was uncertainty that was supposed
to drive economic weakness, delaying notification merely prolongs the
uncertainty. And it's true there was a policy response from the Bank of England - but if anything could have been forecasted it was that.

So what forecasters
fundamentally got wrong was their judgement about the short-term behaviour of
millions of individuals interacting in a very complex system, where (as we know
from the analysis of such systems) relatively small changes in a few variables
can lead to quite different outcomes. The
claim that “the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can set off a tornado in
Texas” is poetic
license – but the inherent difficulty of forecasting short to medium term
perturbations is true both of the economy and the weather.

Now, despite these
difficulties, weather forecasting has got considerably more reliable over the
last 20 years, so there’s plenty of room for economic forecasters to improve –
but explaining how the economy will do
in the next few months is always likely to be very challenging. That’s true of
economic forecasting in “normal” times: but it’s even more so the case when
trying to assess the short-term impacts of a political event on the
psychological attitudes of consumers and investors.

By contrast, predictions
about the long-term impact of Brexit – like climate science - are based on quite different reasoning,
about how changing one key factor – our openness to trade, or the degree to
which the earth’s atmosphere retains heat – changes the long-run properties of
the system. The methodologies used are
well-established and robust – and while of course the detailed modelling of
their impacts requires considerable expertise and huge amounts of data, the
basic mechanisms at work are well-established and easy enough to explain. The operation of the greenhouse effect can be
demonstrated in a school lab.

Similarly, the basic
insights of the “gravity model” approach to predicting international trade –
that trade between two economies depends on how big each is, how far apart they
are, and historical, cultural and policy factors including the existence of
special trade arrangements like the EU – are common sense, and their empirical
and practical validity is not seriously in question. More CO2 will make us hotter: less trade and
migration will make us poorer.

Now, economists’ forecasts
of the long-term impacts of Brexit could still be wrong – or inaccurate- just
as climate scientists could be wrong about the path of climate change. First,
our scenarios could be wrong; Brexit could turn out very differently from the
options (hard or soft, clean or chaotic) most people are trying to analyse;
similarly, sudden technological advances could change the path of CO2
emissions. Second, the numbers are
probably more uncertain even more than the models (which already incorporate some
forms of uncertainty) suggest – some forms of uncertainty are simply impossible
to model.

So while we can predict
that Brexit will reduce growth and CO2 will warm the planet, we should take the
quantitative modelling on just how large these effects are with a large pinch
of salt. In particular, feedback effects
could either amplify or dampen the impacts – and it is very difficult to guess
which. But the basic point - that reductions in trade and migration will reduce
growth and productivity, relative to what otherwise would have occurred – is
very unlikely to be disproved, any more than the greenhouse effect.

So how should that
translate into how we actually make decisions?
Well, I listen to the weather forecast: but, like most Londoners,
whatever it says, I always carry an umbrella.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean I’d buy a house on a flood plain.